ALYSE GREGORY (1882–1967) was born at Norwalk in
Connecticut. One of her first great loves was music and she spent some of her
early years in Europe training to be a singer, but on returning to the United
States became involved in local politics and the woman’s suffrage movement, for
which she was a fearless public speaker. In New York she began contributing
articles to such publications as The Freeman, The New Republic and The
Dial, becoming editor of this last journal in 1924. That same year she
married the English writer Llewelyn Powys and moved with him to Dorset in 1925.
Over the next six years she published three novels – She Shall Have Music (1926),
King Log and Lady Lea (1929) and Hester Craddock (1931).

SHE SHALL HAVE MUSIC

A Novel
First reissue since original publication
With an Introduction by Janice Gregory

She Shall Have Music was Alyse Gregory’s
first novel published in 1926 while she was Managing Editor of The Dial. The book draws from Gregory’s real life, gives her a platform for
examining her feminist beliefs and, strangely enough, foreshadows the
consequences of her choices.

The
novel is both a coming of age story and an awakening to feminine consciousness
for the heroine, Sylvia Pennington Brown. At the outset, young Sylvia, her
mother and her father have just moved to a wealthy suburb of New York City on
Long Island. Sylvia’s brother, Burton, is off stage enjoying (as Sylvia views
it) a great education and worldly adventures accessible only to men.

Mrs.
Pennington Brown, the quintessential social climber, frets over Sylvia’s
bookishness, and schemes to introduce her daughter to society and to marry her
to a man from the upper classes.She is
aided in her schemes by the sycophantic butler, Meadows. Her husband, Mr.
Pennington Brown, escapes to his job as a banker in New York City. While he
minimally supports his wife’s endeavours, he appears more as a pawn in the
action.

Sylvia,
of course, falls in love with a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, the
drunken gardener’s son, Marcel, from the neighbouring estate. Despite his low
birth Marcel is an intellectual living in a study filled with books. Sylvia and
he are simpatico souls seeking knowledge and an understanding of their
unfolding world - a world set in the early twentieth century when new
inventions, such as the car, electric lighting, the airplane, abounded and the social
structure was upended by the consequences of World War I, emerging working
class rights, and feminism.

The
plot of She Shall Have Music uses
Sylvia’s rebellion against her parents’ values and her relationship to men,
lovers and marriage to understand women’s rights in the new world. Gregory
grappled with these issues all her life.

The
style of She Shall Have Music is
languorous in the best sense of the word. Gregory employs multiple metaphors,
similes and complex sentences to reveal the totality of her keen observations. Her
writing is reminiscent of Henry James who, she states, “was the novelist who,
until I read Proust, influenced me most strongly.He taught me to seek out drama in the most
insignificant daily incident, and that the only really important battles are
the eternal ones of the ardent and the magnanimous against the cruel and the
gross.” Sylvia, the heroine, is the ardent and magnanimous while characters
such as Sylvia’s mother, the butler, the gardener and societal norms of the 1920s
represent the cruel and the gross.

An excerpt adapted from Janice Gregory's Introduction

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Janice Gregory holding a copy of SHE SHALL HAVE
MUSIC

Janice gave a well-received presentation on ALYSE GREGORY - OUT OF THE SHADOWS
on Friday, 16 August 2019 8.00 p.m. at The Powys Society Conference
The Hand Hotel, Llangollen

KING LOG AND LADY LEA

A Novel
First Paperback Edition
With an Introduction by Anthony Head

In her second novel, Alyse Gregory recounts the story of Richard and
Mary Holland, a married couple whose seemingly conventional relationship is
threatened by the arrival on the scene of Celia Linton, once the object of
Richard’s attentions several years earlier and now an alluring young woman.
Richard is eager to incorporate her into his life, but hasn’t bargained for the
intangible mutual attraction that develops between the two females. Underlying
this sober tale of love and death is the theme of war between the sexes, with
its unheeded misconceptions and fevered imaginings, but more profoundly the
fear of loneliness and the poignancy of human isolation.

Alyse Gregory (1884-1967) is one of the many as yet unrecognized
American women modernists of the early twentieth century who unfortunately
suppressed her ambitions in order to fulfill the role of the ideal wife
according to the precepts of nineteenth century “true womanhood.” Her second
novel, King Log and Lady Lea (1929) candidly discusses the options
available to women at the time. It opens with a marital breakfast scene which
introduces the reader to Mary and Richard Holland. Mary, who recognizes that
after two years of marriage “her experience had closed in about her and was contained
only in the figure of her husband” [p.4], likens herself to a “wounded gull
shot while flying over a swamp” [5] – the same bird that years later would lend
its name to the title of Gregory’s diary. In spite of this self-knowledge,
willing to forsake her writing, betray her well-developed artistic tastes, and
sacrifice her peace of mind, Mary throws all her intellectual and vital energy
into ensuring her husband’s well-being. In order to afford him some distraction
from the quiet life of the country, she invites Celia, a young woman he had
known before his marriage, to spend a few days with them. The amorous triangle
that ensues and the final tragic death are narrated by Gregory with
psychological insight and poetical intensity.

Gregory had made her position as to modernist experimentation clear in
her reviews for the Dial, of which she had been Managing Editor till her
marriage to Llewelyn Powys. She wanted language to be “simple and selective,”
capable of expressing a clear thought, and she objected, for example, to what
she saw as a lack of “dignity, simplicity, and restraint” in H. D.’s prose [1].King Log and Lady
Lea does not always achieve the simplicity and restraint that Gregory
sought, veering, at times, dangerously close to melodramatic sentimentality,
but the invisible narrative voice, strictly channeled through the consciousness
of the characters, is distanced and controlled in spite of the torments of
agitation that Mary, Richard or Celia occasionally surrender to. Gregory is
sufficiently in command of the narrative to allow for subtle moments of comical
insight, such as when Celia praises Mary’s playing the piano, and Richard, who
had never considered his wife in any way talented, is surprised – and feels
“his own importance enhanced in consequence” [29]. New York, where part of the
novel takes place, and the countryside are also portrayed as experienced by the
characters: for example, we are not told that Richard ran up the steps as he
pursues Celia toward the end of the novel, but that “The tracks above as he
took the last step up the curb seemed to descend upon his head, the pavement to
rise up like a perpendicular plane” [181]: thus the city participates in the
human drama that unfolds on its streets. Similarly, in one of the many scenes in
the country, nature is made into an active element in the minimal plot: “When
would the first yellow irises come, and the pickerel weed, they [Mary and
Celia] wondered, hoping that both would be together to view them, for each drew
away with fear from the thought of separation” [85].

As Anthony Head in his sensitive introduction to the Sundial edition of
this novel states, there is “an undeniably personal nature” in the events that
Gregory recounts in King Log and Lady Lea. However, the novel cannot be
considered a model for Llewelyn Powys’s Love and Death:an Imaginary
Autobiography (1939); Gregory’s novel is not a Proustian reclaiming of “the
significance of past life through creative reordering,” which is how Peter Foss
presents Powys’s novel [2]. Rather, Gregory is attempting to
exorcize – and imaginatively compensate for – a very recent past and its
impending reiteration. The novel can be read as an attempt to come to terms
with the anguish that her husband’s infidelities caused her but also as an attempt
to justify her tolerance of Powys’s insensitive behavior – and to imaginatively
explore the possible results of a woman leaving her husband.

Although it is generally assumed that the novel is based on Llewelyn
Powys’s relationship with Gamel Woolsey, Gregory’s letters home reveal that she
was already busy rewriting her first draft in September 1927 – and feeling
fairly optimistic that it would be much more successful than She Shall Have
Music, her first novel [3]. The direct inspiration for King Log
and Lady Lea would have beenPowys’s affair with Betty Marsh, a
young woman he had known before he married Alyse Gregory; Powys did not meet
Woolsey until after their return to Patchin Place in November 1927. In an
undated letter to Malcolm Elwin, Gregory explains how, soon after her marriage
to Powys, she had agreed to Betty’s visit, thus establishing a precedent for
the later relationship with Woolsey. She had always valued her independence and
solitude and by giving her husband the liberty he sought gained a certain
measure of freedom for herself – a license she would never take advantage of.
Although in King Log and Lady Lea she examines the consequences of
conjugal freedom, the novel is more fictional than autobiographical. If, as
Jacqueline Peltier in A Woman at her Window rightly points out,
descriptions of Celia coincide with the descriptions of Gamel Woolsey in The
Cry of a Gull, this is because Gregory would continue rewriting her novel
till it was published at the end of 1929, incorporating characteristics of the
woman who was indeed to become one of her closest friends.

The question of a lesbian relationship is inevitably raised by King
Log and Lady Lea; Rosemary Manning remarked on this possibility, but
dismissed it, saying “That her [Mary’s] relationship with Celia is lesbian is
hinted at, but is unimportant. The story’s power is in the alliance of these
two women against the man they both love” [4]. I agree with Manning
that this is not a significant issue in the novel, which is much more than an
examination of female friendship. The themes of the novel focus on fear of the
natural processes of life: ageing – particularly for women – and death; on the
total solitude of human beings that is never fully assuaged even by the beauty
and variety of nature; and on the impossibility of real communication and
interpenetration with others – achieved in nature but rarely by humans. It is
also about the sexual life-force of women that post-Victorian society strove to
deny, and the lack of understanding between human beings and particularly men
and women.

Gregory does not focus exclusively on how female friendship empowers
women in her attempt to understand human behavior; her capacity for
psychological insight and her admiration for Freud’s theories does not allow
for a simple resolution to the human triangle created by Richard. Mary does not
want to hurt her husband by leaving him suddenly; although she recognizes that
her life had folded in on itself after marriage and that she had lost – and
misses – the independence of mind and action that she had previously enjoyed,
on some level, she still loves Richard and pities him. Celia’s allegiances,
however, have turned exclusively to Mary and, through Celia, Gregory captures
the fears, insecurities, and jealousies that plague all relationships. Pity and
jealousy lead to a series of fraught, almost melodramatic scenes that culminate
in a tragic street accident. Mary’s sense of obligation to Richard, and her
inability to fully confide in Celia because she sees her as thirteen years
younger and so a rival on the sexual arena come close to destroying the women’s
friendship. And yet Gregory ends the novel on an optimistic note; a tune
spiritedly played by an Italian band offers Mary a promise of fullness of life,
and – we hope – a renewal of the bonds of friendship.

The title, King Log and Lady Lea, might appear puzzling: Gregory
confided in her mother that it did not fully please her but that she had not
been able to come up with anything better. The phallic log – representing
felled virility – and the fallow lea of the title dispel any hints of a lesbian
focus to the novel, and concentrate on the sterile male/female relationship.
King Log could be a reference to Aesop’s Fable of “The Frogs who Desired a
King,” alluding to women’s presumed need of a master, as expressed by Herr Hugo
von Stirner in his cameo appearance in chapter nineteen of the novel. But
Gregory herself gives us another possible interpretation: she prefaced the
first edition of the novel published by Constable in 1929, with two quotations,
the second a variant of the nursery rhyme:

London bridge is broken down,

Dance over my Lady Lea;

London bridge is broken down,

With a gay ladye.

Lady Lea – sometimes spelt
Lee – has been variously identified, but could be Lady Margaret Wyatt, a
childhood friend of Anne Boleyn who accompanied the doomed queen as she awaited
her fate in the tower. In that case, and Gregory’s erudition was far-reaching,
the reference could be to the loyalty of women’s friendships.

The other quotation, the first four lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 41,
“Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits” seems to exonerate infidelity as a
trifling misdemeanor. Although the betrayal in King Log and Lady Lea is
committed by Richard, it is Mary who, true to social prejudices, feels guilty.
She takes responsibility for having invited Celia, for being older and
therefore of less interest to Richard, for enjoying her newly-found female
friendship with Celia, for being angry at Richard’s callous behavior. At no
point does her husband even entertain the thought that he has done wrong; he is
incapable of seeing the events from her point of view or of understanding how
he has hurt and offended both her and Celia – nonetheless, Gregory, by her
sensitive portrayal of Richard’s tormented mind, makes him into an amiable
character whose predicament rouses the reader’s compassion. Mary’s obligation
was to construct and safeguard his faith in his virility and in his social and
artistic talents; the moment she strays from this path, his sense of identity
is shattered: he finally sees himself as “a figure puerile and insignificant. .
. . To whom could he cling? Who was there to comfort him? . . . He was a
Philistine, a failure” [18]).

King Log and Lady Lea rehearses imaginatively the opinions on marriage that Gregory expressed
in her diaries and, more publicly, in articles published in literary journals
in the early twenties and in Wheels on Gravel, a collection of essays
that came out in 1938. “The Dilemma of Marriage,” an article in the New
Republic on 4 July 1923, is a radical statement against monogamous marriage
and the unequal treatment of women in a nation that had just recently, in 1920,
given women the right to vote. Gregory, who had fought for suffrage, and who by
this time was living with Powys, but not yet married to him, audaciously
affirms that “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that most monogamous
marriages are compromises based upon mutual illusion, and maintained by fear”
[15]) – and fear is one of the essential components of all the relationships in
King Log and Lady Lea. By 1938, when she published Wheels on Gravel, which
includes an essay of the same title, her views had been tempered by her experiences
with Powys and by time itself, although she continued to believe in the
polygamous nature of humankind and in the positive aspects of polygamy. To add
weight to her argument she turned to Nietzsche, whose Dionysian joy of life she
struggled to make her own, a joy she projects onto Mary: “Life means for us
constantly to transform into light and flame all that we are or meet with”[5].

However, Gregory – as is Mary – is fully aware of the tension created by
the need for tenderness and security as opposed to this need to live
adventurously. She insists that a woman who loses the love of her
husband/companion to another woman should not feel belittled, for such a loss
bears no “stigma of dishonour” [76], and the suffering caused by feeling “her
own worth annulled” and seeing herself “shorn of every charm” [75] can be
combated by “intelligence – intelligence and more intelligence” [77]. And yet,
as she had written in Wheels on Gravel, “Women create the illusions in
which men thrive and themselves perish in the illusions they create” [63]. In
her earlier, imaginative, recreation of the theme, the women do not perish:
Richard’s obvious infidelity stirs Mary to reflect on how and why she has
transformed herself from the independent, fearless woman she had been before
her marriage, to virtual non-existence: “she had nearly vanished altogether”
[41] as she says of herself. But at a critical moment in their relationship,
Mary reflects that “If he no longer loved her she had nothing to lose in being
herself” [49].

The carefully prepared and designed Sundial edition of King Log and
Lady Lea makes this novel by Alyse Gregory available after many years to
the general public, and together with Hester Craddock, her third novel,
published by Sundial Press in 2007, should do much to affirm Gregory’s position
as a modernist writer of stature. King Log and Lady Lea, a study of
infidelity and the struggle to overcome fear of solitude, is still valid today
and probably more likely to attract readers than the later novel.

Hester
Craddock and her sister Nelly live with their aloof brother Wilfred in a
cottage on a remote headland. The comfortable monotony of their routine lives
is broken irrevocably by the arrival in the local village of the writer Edwin
Pallant and his attractive artist friend Halmath Tryan. Casual acquaintance
leads to deeper involvement as the protagonists become entangled in a web of
shifting relationships, in which the desire for knowledge and experience
unleashes the forces of jealousy, suspicion, and despair, with unforeseen
consequences.‘This attractive reissue of
her third novel, Hester Craddock, an acutely observed psychological
drama, is especially welcome. It is certainly an impressive and memorable
work.’ – The TLS, 2007‘Hester Craddock is a rich and powerful
book... It is a novel of psychic moods, inner tensions and forces.. However
much of Alyse’s personal experiences and torments went into the writing of this
novel, they have been through the crucible of her imagination to produce a work
of fiction of wide scale and deep intensity.’ – Rosemary Manning

*
*
* * *

An
excerpt from Barbara Ozieblo's introduction to HESTER CRADDOCK

As
Hester and Edwin, in the last pages of Hester
Craddock, ‘approached the Black Nore promontory
where the sun was flinging its powerful rays onto the abrupt bitten edges of
the white dazzling cliffs’, their own troubles are reflected in the stark
solitude of the terrain and the melancholy mewing of the gulls. Alyse Gregory,
author of this novel that was published in 1931, also identified with the cliffs and the downs where she had
made her home in 1925, and
where she would remain – with brief absences – until 1957.

Gregory
had moved to Dorset from New York where she had been Managing Editor of The Dial; she was also an
established essayist and book reviewer, a largely self educated, responsive and
intelligent woman who had decided to give up her independence and career for
love. Born on 19 July 1884 into a well-established family in
Norwalk, Connecticut, she had always felt herself to be the outsider, the
unwanted child that could never live up to her parents’ expectations. Unable to
face failure and yet terrified of boredom, her extreme awareness and
sensitivity made those early years into a time ‘to be endured’ rather than ‘enjoyed’,
and allowed her to build up the ‘granite strength of character and courage’
that would see her through life and, eventually, suicide, on 27 August, 1967.1

At
the turn of the century, the moral strictures of the Victorian era were giving
way to the demands of evolution, technological progress, and women’s rights; in
some ways, Gregory benefited from this move toward what we can, today, call a
modernist liberalization of thought and mores. She spent some years in Italy and
France, studying music – she had an excellent singing voice – but, unwilling to
trust her voice in public, she returned to Connecticut after a few years to, as
she would set down in her autobiography The Day
Is Gone (1948), ‘pursue ends concealed from others’. An idealistic interest
in town politics and education, a deep, active commitment to the woman suffrage
movement, writing, and editorial jobs in New York filled the next years. She soon
made a place for herself in literary and intellectual circles, counting
Scofield Thayer, Harold Stearns and Randolph Bourne among her closest friends.
In early 1924 she
accepted the position of Managing Editor of The
Dial, a prestigious post she would

hand
over to the poet Marianne Moore in July 1925
in order to accompany her husband to
England.